Music Video Of The Day: Everybody Wants To Rule The World (1985, directed by Nigel Dick)

Yesterday, when I wrote about the video for Shout by Tears For Fears, I apparently made up a song that doesn’t actually exist. I wrote that Shout was the band’s signature song, along with Everyone Wants To Rule The World. I also wrote about the joint vocalist of Tears for Fears, Richard Orzabal. Not only did I make up a song that didn’t exist but I also created an extra member of Tears For Fears. As everyone knows, the song is called Everybody Wants To Rule The World and the singer is named Roland Orzabal. I don’t know how I screwed up those two simple facts last night. Maybe I was writing from Earth-2.

For many people, Everybody Wants To Rule The World will always be the song from Real Genius. The song actually first appeared on the 1985 album, Songs From The Big Chair, for which it was a last-minute addition. Roland Orzabal has said that he originally felt that the song was too lightweight and that it wouldn’t be a good fit with the rest of the album but producer Chris Hughes convinced Orzabal to include the song. Hughes felt that the song would chart well in America and he turned out to be correct. Would the song have been as popular if it had been called by its original title, Everybody Wants To Go To War? That’s like asking if War and Peace would have been as much of a success if Tolstoy had called it War! What Is It Good For?

As for the video, it features Curt Smith driving through the desert, people racing dune buggies, men dancing in front of gas pumps, and the Cabazon Dinosaurs. The scenes of Curt in the desert were filmed in California and Nevada while the scenes of Tears For Fears performing were shot in London. Curt Smith has said that the shooting of the video was a “disaster” and that there was a serious accident involving the dune buggies that led to a child being thrown from one of the vehicles and hitting his head on a rock, leaving him temporarily unconscious. Despite all of the difficulty involved in shooting the video, it was still placed in heavy rotation on MTV and played no small role in making the song a hit.

Everybody Wants To Rule The World spent two weeks as the number one song in the U.S. In the UK, it peaked at number two, the only thing keeping it from reach the top being the charity single, We Are The World.